Scanned reprints of the above articles are provided as a courtesy for educational and research use only. They should not be further disseminated without permission of the publishers.

Teaching Philosophy

Current Research Interests/Projects

My scholarly interests are wide-ranging, including the following:

In collaboration with Craig Heller at Stanford University, I have proposed hypotheses linking the function of sleep to brain energy metabolism, and linking the function of REM sleep to events taking place during nonREM sleep.

In collaboration with Marcos Frank at University of Pennsylvania, I have proposed a range of possible cellular and molecular connections between sleep and synaptic plasticity.

I have written a textbook titled How Science Really Works, which uses historical examples of major scientific advances to show how scientists have figured out the workings of the physical world. This textbook is used in all sections of St. Bonaventure University’s liberal-arts core course Inquiry in the Natural World (Clare 302).

I am completing work on a book titled Born to Care: How Devotion to Others Became Part of Human Nature, which shows how human altruism has evolved and how caring for others is essential for human fulfillment.

I am interested in a number of other subjects, some of which have been and will be discussed in my personal blog. According to Google, I am the world’s leading pro-human extremist.

My laboratory research in collaboration with students at St. Bonaventure University has included studies of:

the effects of sleep deprivation on cellular energy metabolism in rats (in collaboration with researchers at Stanford University)

the effects of oxidative stress on cellular energy metabolism and ADP ribose production in primary cultures of astrocytes (in collaboration with Dr. Raymond Swanson at University of California at San Francisco)

In these projects, we have used high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) to measure ATP, ADP, AMP, NAD, phosphocreatine, and ADP ribose concentrations in cellular extracts. Measurement of the concentrations of these molecules indicates the metabolic energy state of the cells in question.